The courage to BE resides in the God who arrives when God disappears; the 'I' that arrives when 'I' disappears.

What is Art?

﻿“There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.” – Erica Jong.

“You cannot reach lofty heights in art if you do not first discover the unsurpassable beauty in your own heart.” – Buddha.

“What makes good screenwriting? When you can tell the writer cares. When language is still important. When the formulas are all toyed with to the point that unexpected things happen. When audiences are treated like intelligent adults and their emotions are touched. Touch me and I’ll care… And in the end, it is a visceral not a cerebral medium, so it is about heart and soul, not mind…” – Richard Krevolin.

“People prefer artistic tricks to true discoveries. Truth is messier and more complex than a gimmick. Flash is preferred to real insight because flash gives the illusion of insight without requiring the actual effort of learning anything new. It’s a fact of psychic life that our ideas and emotions are organized to resist fundamental change. Real art is always going to be resisted, because its experiences will never neatly fit into pre-existing categories. It makes us work. We can’t just sit back and take it in. We have to wake up and scramble.” – Ray Carney.

“When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence.” – Aristotle.

“Tolstoy argues that true art is reflective of the religious consciousness of the age and is measured by its degree of infectuousness to the consumer. It is valued by having particularity, clarity, and sincerity of feeling from the artist.” – Review.

“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” – Cecil Beaton.

“The sheep-like tendency of human society very quickly makes inroads on a child’s unsophistications, then formal brain-washing (formal education) completes the work with its systematic formulae, techniques and second-hand information…. and individual passion, courage and inspiration evaporates, hurtling the unwitting and well-educated through space into that hateful oblivion, mediocrity.” – Billy Marshall-Stoneking.